Here's a commission to build a sculpture commemorating the fallen in Iraq and Afghanistan - it has to occupy such-and-such a space and be of a certain depth and height.

How many different sculptures can you imagine?

Now here's your life. . .

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People have asked me why I'm leaving my post as arts writer to study for the ministry at Dubuque Theological Seminary. What do the arts have to do with Jesus, God and religion?

Well, everything.

Like religion, the arts speak to our imaginations, our passions, our sense of life's meaning and value - to all the things, in fact, that make us human beings. The new vistas that open to us when a piece of music modulates from one key to another; the disclosure of a hidden, inner reality in an abstract painting's dance of shape and color; the meaning received from a poem, a meaning that can never be paraphrased, put into nonpoetic language - all of these are ways that artists of various kinds grapple with and reflect on the mystery of things.

They grow out of our sense of wonder, joy, and sometimes, out of our despair over life. They all hint, I believe, at a greater reality that dwells within life even as it contains life: God.

So the arts can, I think, teach us something about religion.

One such lesson is a sense of vocation. No one should pursue music, visual art or poetry as a profession unless pursuing that vocation is the chief thing that brings joy and meaning to life, and hence is something of a compulsion. The same is true for ministry - or for any profession that believes itself to be about something bigger than that other, noble, necessary task in life: putting bread on the table.

At that same time, the arts teach us that a vocation isn't merely about a subjective sense of call. Others must come to agree that such a call exists; in a way, an artist only exists when the relevant community of appreciators and gatekeepers eventually come, over time, to acknowledge that this is so. The same is true for a religious vocation.

But it's not only that a subjective sense of call isn't enough. It's also that the person of the artist with that subjective call - or the person of the minister with that subjective call - is, in a certain sense, expendable.

Page 2 of 2 - For it's the poem that matters, not the poet; the painting, not the painter; the role, not the actor. Good artists are about their art, not about themselves. They disappear into what they do. In the same way, it's the message that matters, not the minister who delivers it.